Speaker and Panelist Biographies
IJCAI 2017 Industry Day

Bio

Dr. Ye joined DiDi in 2015 from his position of a tenured professor at University of Michigan. Dr. Ye leads DiDi’s big-data research team of several hundreds of machine-learning scientists and engineers on developing innovative solutions for the world’s largest transportation platform.

Dr. Ye holds a Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from University of Minnesota at Twin Cities. He is a globally recognized expert in machine learning, data mining and big data analytics. He has won the best paper awards at top international conferences including ICML and KDD. He serves as a chair or area chair of top international conferences including NIPS, ICML, KDD, SDM, ICDM, and IJCAI, as well as an editorial board member of premier international journals including IEEE TPAMI, DMKD, and IEEE TKDE.

Bio

In-depth knowledge and hands-on experiences in e-commerce, AI and online advertising. Areas of expertise include Large Scale Infrastructure and System Design, Cloud Computing, Machine Learning, Computational Advertising, and Data Mining.

Currently President of Business Growth BU and Corporate VP at JD.COM, responsible for advertising R&D and business, big data monetization R&D and business, and areas of AI R&D to drive these businesses.

Bio

Pinpin Zhu invented dozens of patented products including “Chatting Robot System”, “SMS robot system”, and “Customers service device enabled by HCI technology”. He had taken the lead of the invention of intelligent interactive engine, and provided intelligent customer service robot system on SMS, WEB, WAP, APP, weibo, WeChat for Chinese telecommunication operators, Lenovo, Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, Bank of Communications, China Merchants Bank, Shanghai Municipal Human Resources and Social Security Bureau, Huawei, SF express and other enterprises and government branches. China’s first intelligent robot on WeChat was also invented by Dr. Zhu, and it has become a standard of the industry.

Pinpin Zhu was hired as a member of “User Interface and HCI standard”, or “SC35” of The National Information Technology Standardization Committee, and he had participated in the drafting of the first international standard of affective computing. He was selected by Ministry of Science and Technology and the Propaganda Department of the Central Committee of the CPC as “the most beautiful technology personnel”, and held the honor of “Top 10 IT Prominent Youth of Shanghai”, “Model of Software Industry of Shanghai”, “Medal of Youth May Fourth of Shanghai”, “Leading Talents of Science and Technology of Jiading District”, "Pioneer of Shanghai Smart City Program". He is a technology pioneer of the developing IT domain of Shanghai.

As an expert of China AI, Pinpin Zhu was invited to attend the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Annual Conference of American Association for Artificial Intelligence, to discuss the development of AI with other top experts from the globe.

Bio

Marco is the data science team lead at Rome2rio, where he is responsible for overseeing a diverse range of data-intensive analysis and engineering tasks. He previously completed a PhD in the Natural Language Processing group at the University of Melbourne.

Bio

Elizabeth is a co-founder of Symbolix. As Managing Director she has overseen seven years of growth and transitioned the company from statistical consulting to a diverse data science agency. Symbolix builds custom data science tools, analysis services and support for other data-focussed teams. They work across private and public sectors, providing solutions for transport, energy, resource management, environmental risk and much more.

Elizabeth's background is in computational mathematics but she has provided consulting, analysis and project management to clients in government, environmental management, transport and others. Currently she is focussed on building agile strategies for small teams and startups, building cloud software environments to power data science and mobile apps, testing deep learning solutions to new problems and (reliably) hacking multiple data streams into useful business insight.

Bio

Seb Chan is ACMI’s Chief Experience Officer. Prior to this he led the digital renewal and transformation of the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum in New York (2011-2015) and drove the Powerhouse Museum's pioneering work in open access, mass collaboration and digital experience during the 2000s. He has also worked as a museum consultant with institutions across North America, Europe and Asia; and was a member of the Australian Government's Gov2.0 taskforce. His work has won awards from American Alliance of Museums, One Club, D&AD, Fast Company, Core77. He also leads a parallel life in digital art and electronic music.

Bio

Andy Kitchen is an independent AI researcher and consultant who has launched 2 high-tech startups in Australia. He founded Melbourne's Machine Learning and AI Meetup group; now one of Australia's largest AI interest groups with over 2,500 members. He has been on winning teams in multiple local and international Data Science competitions including HealthHack, GovHack and the SPIE ProstateX Challenge.

Bio

Anthony is the President of the ACS and the principal of a multidisciplinary law and consulting firm, AGW Lawyers & Consultants advising on the Digital Economy, intellectual property law and licensing, privacy and data protection, security and cyberlaw, technology law including the emerging issues arising from the growth and convergence of technologies including cloud, the Internet of Things (IoT), big data, robotics, machine learning and artificial intelligence.

An advocate for the Digital Economy, Anthony chaired the NSW Government ICT Advisory Panel and was a member of the Commonwealth Government ICT Industry Innovation Council. He has held senior management positions across industry and government, including as CIO of the Australian Tourist Commission during the Sydney 2000 Olympics and led the digital development for Thomson in the Asia Pacific.

Anthony graduated with a B.Sc. in Computer Science and a Bachelors of Law from Monash University, Master of Laws in Media, Communications and IT Law from UNSW and a Master of Intellectual Property from UTS.

Anthony is a regular presenter and speaker at numerous national and international conferences.

Bio

Experienced technical leader with strong analytics skills and experience across a broad range of disciplines including data science, architecture, software engineering, statistics and applied machine learning.

Bio

Jonathan is the founder and managing director of Silverpond, a technology consulting company based in Melbourne. Founded in 2005, Silverpond has been working with startups and organisations such as 7-Eleven, Powercor and Australia Post, helping them navigate and deliver solutions across major technological trends such as web, mobile and now machine learning.

Machine learning will touch and transform every industry, and Silverpond is proud to help promote and develop the machine learning industry in Australia by running deep learning workshops, hosting events and conferences, and helping grow the local industry group, Melbourne AI.

Bio

Amin Zheng is a researcher at Meitu. His research focuses on deep learning and its applications on computer vision. Dr. Zheng got his PhD degree in Electronic and Computer Engineering from Hong Kong University of Science and Technology in 2017. During his PhD, he spent one year as a visiting research scholar at National Institute of Informatics (NII) in Tokyo, Japan.

Bio

Dr. John R. Smith is IBM Fellow and Manager of Multimedia and Vision at IBM T. J. Watson Research Center. He leads IBM’s Research & Development on image and video analysis and understanding including: IBM Watson Developer Cloud Visual Recognition, Skin Cancer Image Analysis, IBM Multimedia Analysis and Retrieval System (IMARS), Intelligent Video Analytics (IVA), and Video Understanding for Augmented Creativity. Dr. Smith previously served as Senior Manager, Intelligent Information Systems and was Principal Investigator for numerous IBM R&D projects on multimedia and vision. Dr. Smith was also a founding participant and served on the Advisory Committee for the NIST TRECVID Video Retrieval Evaluation, where his research teams participated in evaluations for more than a decade. Dr. Smith recently served as co-General Chair of ACM Intl. Conf. on Multimedia Retrieval (ICMR-2016) in New York City. Previously, he was Editor-in-Chief of IEEE Multimedia from 2010 – 2014, Associate Editor-in-Chief from 2006 - 2010 and Standards Editor from 2003 - 2006. Earlier Dr. Smith led IBM's participation in MPEG-7 / MPEG-21 standards and served as a Chair of the MPEG Multimedia Description Schemes Sub-Group and co-project Editor of MPEG-7 Standard. Historically, with Prof. Shih-Fu Chang at Columbia University, Dr. Smith developed some of the earliest approaches for content-based image and video retrieval, including VisualSEEk - content-based image retrieval system, and WebSEEk - one of the first image and video search engines for the Web in 1995! Dr. Smith is a Fellow of IEEE.,

Bio

Dr. Dou Shen, Vice President of Baidu Inc., is now in charge of Baidu’s flagship product – ShouJi Baidu App and Baidu Feed. His research interests include information retrieval, data mining and artificial intelligence. Before joining Baidu, Dr. Shen co-founded Buzzlabs, which was acquired by CityGrid. He published dozens of papers over TOIS, TKDE, IJCAI, AAAI, ICML, SIGIR, and so on. He was the vice general chair for SIGKDD 2012 and Industry PC chair for CIKM 2012 and SIGKDD 2016.

Bio

Charles Parker is the Vice President of Machine Learning Algorithms at BigML. He holds a Ph.D. in computer science from Oregon State University. He was previously a research associate at the Eastman Kodak Company where he applied machine learning to image, audio, video, and document analysis. He also worked as a research analyst for Allston Holdings, a proprietary stock trading company, developing statistically-based trading strategies for U.S. and European futures markets. His current work for BigML is in the areas of Deep Learning and Bayesian Parameter Optimization.

Bio

Dr. Yu Dong is Deputy Director of Tencent AI Lab and he oversees the operation and management of the AI Lab in Seattle to drive Tencent’s research on speech recognition and natural language processing. Dr. Yu is one of the leading researchers who first applied deep learning in speech recognition, and has contributed significantly towards the development of speech recognition technology. He is an author of two books and a large number of theses, a holder of 60 patents and one of the founders and leading author of CNTK, an open source deep learning toolkit.

Prior to joining Tencent, he was the principal researcher of Speech and Dialog Group at Microsoft, an adjunct professor at Zhejiang University, a visiting professor at University of Science and Technology of China and a visiting researcher at Shanghai Jiao Tong University. He was also honored with the Best Paper Award by the IEEE Signal Processing Society in 2013 and 2016.

Dr. Yu is currently a member of the IEEE Speech and Language Processing Technical Committee. He has served the editorial boards of IEEE / ACM Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing, IEEE Signal Processing Magazine and other journals.

Dr. Yu received a BSc degree in electrical engineering from Zhejiang University, an MSc degree in pattern recognition and intelligent control from the Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences, an MSc degree in computer science from Indiana University, Bloomington, and a PhD degree in computer science from the University of Idaho.

Bio

Andrew Groth, a senior executive with over 30 years’ experience in delivering value to clients in technology, outsourcing, consulting, business processes and next-generation services. He is the Infosys Regional Head for Australia and New Zealand and in this role, is responsible for leading strategy and growth for the $10 billion company’s third largest market globally. Andrew also leads the Financial Services business for Infosys across the Asia Pacific region, helping organisations renew existing approaches and address new challenges Andrew joined Infosys in 2010 to head up the company’s Financial Services business in Australia and New Zealand, where he significantly grew relationships with the region’s major financial institutions. Over the years he has taken on additional roles within Infosys, including Head of Financial Services – Asia Pacific and Head of Enterprise and Industry Services. Having lived and worked in Europe, Asia, Australia and the United States, Andrew brings a broad cultural and business background and has a track record of building strong, diverse teams.

Prior to Infosys, Andrew was a Senior Vice President at Genpact based in London, where he led the growth of the business and its customer relationships across the EMEA region. Previously, Andrew spent 19 years at CSC in a broad range of roles, including the strategic development of its large-scale sourcing, systems integration and consulting business. Andrew is a Graduate of the Australian Institute of Company Directors, holds an MBA from the Australian Graduate School of Management and is a Senior Associate of the Australian & New Zealand Institute of Insurance and Finance. Known for his authentic and engaging approach with clients, partners and employees, Andrew is also passionate about encouraging Australia’s youth to build digital careers and develop STEM skills. As chair of the company’s award winning Corporate Social Responsibility program, Infosys staff are involved in programs that contribute to STEM experiences and education for our youth and support for the disadvantaged. Andrew represents Infosys in the Business Council of Australia and actively participates in the BCA’s innovation task force.

Bio

In 2015 Stefan co-founded the Brain-Inspired Computing Research program of IBM Research – Australia and now leads it as Manager, IBM Research Staff Member and Honorary Research Fellow at the Centre for Neural Engineering at the University of Melbourne. His team spearheads an effort to employ IBM’s cognitive TrueNorth chip to develop artificial intelligence-enabled biomedical and healthcare solutions at the intersection of neuroscience and neuromorphic computing. Since joining IBM Research in 2008, Stefan has worked on biotechnology and nanotechnology research projects at IBM Albany Nanotech and the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center in New York as well as at IBM Research Australia. He has held positions as Lead of the Lab Innovation Development Team and Technical Assistant to the Lab Director and currently is a Technical Assistant to Dr. Michael Karasick, VP of Cognitive Computing at IBM Research. Stefan has authored and co-authored over 40 technical publications, is an inventor on 30 issued patents and has more than 20 patents pending. He is a Senior Member of the IEEE, a member of the New York Academy of Sciences and the American Chemical Society, and an Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Nanobioscience. Stefan has received a Research Scholarship from UC Berkeley, a Karl Chang Innovation Fund Grant from MIT and Research Grants from the NIH and the Australian Research Council. His work has been featured in WIRED Magazine, Popular Science, Scientific American, TechTimes, Engadget and Fast Company amongst others. He holds a PhD in EECS from the Technical University Munich and an Honours Masters Certificate in Technology Management from the Center for Digital Technology and Management.

Bio

Tuomas Sandholm is Professor at Carnegie Mellon University in the Computer Science Department, with affiliate professor appointments in the Machine Learning Department, Ph.D. Program in Algorithms, Combinatorics, and Optimization (ACO), and CMU/UPitt Joint Ph.D. Program in Computational Biology. He is the Founder and Director of the Electronic Marketplaces Laboratory. He has published over 450 papers. He has 27 years of experience building optimization-powered electronic marketplaces, and has fielded several of his systems. He is Founder and CEO of Optimized Markets, Inc., which is bringing a new paradigm to advertising campaign sales and scheduling - in TV (linear and digital), Internet display, mobile, game, radio, and cross-media advertising. He was Founder, Chairman, and CTO/Chief Scientist of CombineNet, Inc. from 1997 until its acquisition in 2010. During this period the company commercialized over 800 of the world's largest-scale generalized combinatorial multi-attribute auctions, with over $60 billion in total spend and over $6 billion in generated savings. His algorithms also run the UNOS kidney exchange, which includes 66% of the transplant centers in the US. He has served as market design consultant or board member for Baidu, Yahoo!, Google, Chicago Board Options Exchange, swap.com, Granata Decision Systems, and others. He has developed the leading algorithms for several general classes of game. He holds a Ph.D. and M.S. in computer science and a Dipl. Eng. (M.S. with B.S. included) with distinction in Industrial Engineering and Management Science. Among his many honors are the NSF Career Award, inaugural ACM Autonomous Agents Research Award, Sloan Fellowship, Carnegie Science Center Award for Excellence, Edelman Laureateship, and Computers and Thought Award. He is Fellow of the ACM, AAAI, and INFORMS. He holds an honorary doctorate from the University of Zurich.

Bio

Dr. Hongxia Yang is working as the Senior Staff Data Scientist and Director in Data Technology and Product Division, Alibaba Group. Her interests span the areas of Bayesian statistics, time series analysis, spatial-temporal modeling, survival analysis, machine learning, data mining and their applications to problems in business analytics and big data. Current on-going projects in her team include huge dynamic multi-level heterogenous graphical model for user profiling system, large-scale distributed knowledge graph and its efficient inference for data enabling platform and general ensemble prediction framework for various revenue and costs forecasting, among several others. She used to work as the Principal Data Scientist at Yahoo! Inc and Research Staff Member at IBM T.J. Watson Research Center respectively and got her PhD degree in Statistics from Duke University in 2010. She has published close to 30 top conference and journal papers and held 9 filed/to be filed US patents and is serving as the associate editor for Applied Stochastic Models in Business and Industry.